01Oct

The Nuclear Submarine U.S.S. Bodacious Resurfaces After Six Months of “Deep and Silent”

• Saved in: Chris Orcutt Books, Fiction Writing, Novel Writing, Novels, Personal Essay, Technology & the Internet, Writing Experiences, Writing Life, Writing Tools
• by Chris Orcutt
• with 1 Comment

About five months ago, I bought a count­down clock that sits direct­ly below my com­put­er mon­i­tor, and for 157 days it’s been tick­ing down.

It’s been tick­ing down to my self-imposed dead­line for the sec­ond draft of my behe­moth epic nov­el (a series, actu­al­ly). Last Decem­ber, I set a dead­line for myself: I would fin­ish this draft by Sep­tem­ber 30, 2023.

Well, I fin­ished two days ahead of time.

I’m proud of myself. If noth­ing else, I’ve been incred­i­bly pro­duc­tive. In 157 days, I wrote 337,397 new words (or an aver­age of 2,135/day); I revised 189,858 words (an aver­age of 1,202 words); mak­ing for a total of 527,255 words (3,337/day). To do this, I rou­tine­ly woke at 3 a.m. (espe­cial­ly dur­ing the final 30-day push) and worked 16 hours a day.

Speak­ing for myself, the sec­ond draft of every nov­el I write is usu­al­ly the hard­est. It’s the hard­est draft because it’s the one in which you need to def­i­nite­ly deter­mine what the sto­ry is, and you need to put in EVERYTHING so that when you start work on the third draft, you can focus on cut­ting. Basi­cal­ly, if you liken the nov­el-writ­ing process to sculp­ture, the first two drafts are when you’re mak­ing your block of clay or mar­ble, and in the sub­se­quent drafts you chip away every­thing that does­n’t look like the sto­ry you’ve envis­aged.

But now that the sec­ond draft is com­plete, I believe that all of that hard work has been worth it. My teen epic (the first of its kind) now totals 1,542,148 words. I did the cal­cu­la­tions the oth­er day, and the 1.5 mil­lion words of my epic is the equiv­a­lent of 300 five-thou­sand-word short sto­ries.

Rec­og­niz­ing that mod­ern read­ers pre­fer their sto­ries in more com­pact, “binge­able” sizes, I have divid­ed this Brob­d­ing­na­gian tale into 14 more man­age­able “episodes” of about 100,000 words each, and when I pub­lish the series in approx­i­mate­ly two years, I’ll do it seri­al­ly—with a new install­ment com­ing out every two to three months.

I’ve been work­ing on this teen epic for eight years now. Eight years. In the time that I’ve been writ­ing, the plan­et Earth has revolved around the sun eight times; the world under­went cat­a­stroph­ic upheaval from COVID-19; and my nephew, who was five years old when I start­ed, cel­e­brat­ed his 13^th birth­day (but he’s still into Legos—good for you, dude).

And to pow­er this word out­put, over the course of these eight years, fig­ur­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive aver­age of 5 cups per day, I have drunk 14,600 cups of cof­fee.

The sec­ond draft is done, but there’s obvi­ous­ly a lot of work to do on the series. Start­ing in Decem­ber, the work will shift to revi­sion, par­tic­u­lar­ly to par­ing down the mam­moth man­u­script. My aim is to cut about 300,000 words (or 20%) so that when I final­ly pub­lish the series, it will be a dozen vol­umes of 100,000 words each. This will make my series twice as long as Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Why am I fix­at­ed on all of these num­bers, you ask? Well, I’ve writ­ten about this on my blog before—and men­tioned it in inter­views and podcasts—but nov­el writ­ing is as much a num­bers game as it is a words game. In order to write a novel—and espe­cial­ly a long novel—you have to pro­duce a lot of words (at least 1,000) a day, and you have to pro­duce con­sis­tent­ly.

And to pro­duce con­sis­tent­ly, you have to dras­ti­cal­ly reduce (if not elim­i­nate) the dis­trac­tions in your life. You have to—selfishly and unequivocally—make your writ­ing the cen­ter of your uni­verse. This means not engag­ing with social media. It means not spend­ing as much time with your friends as you might like. It means sac­ri­fic­ing sleep, fam­i­ly gath­er­ings, birth­day par­ties, Christ­mas par­ties, movie pre­mieres, vaca­tions, and even know­ing what’s hap­pen­ing in the world.

The com­put­er I use for writ­ing does not have an inter­net con­nec­tion; I have pur­pose­ly set up my work process and tools to be free of the inter­net. (Indeed, I enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly agree with nov­el­ist Jonathan Franzen who in his “Ten Rules for Nov­el­ists” writes (Rule #8) that any­body with access to the inter­net while they’re writ­ing is prob­a­bly not pro­duc­ing very inter­est­ing fic­tion.)  I check my email once a day (on my phone), and I only go on the inter­net about once a week. There are only two peo­ple in the world with whom I text reg­u­lar­ly: my wife and Jason Scott Sad­of­sky. I don’t have com­mer­cial TV (only stream­ing), so I don’t watch the news or see com­mer­cials for prod­ucts. I don’t lis­ten to the news on the radio, and if I’m lis­ten­ing to music on the local clas­si­cal or clas­sic rock sta­tion and the news comes on, I shut it off.

Over the years a few peo­ple have asked me what it’s like to be a nov­el­ist, to spend all of your wak­ing hours (not to men­tion your sleep­ing hours) inhab­it­ing and writ­ing about worlds of your own cre­ation. To answer their ques­tion, I’ve giv­en peo­ple a num­ber of analo­gies, but I think the best one is that it’s like being on a nuclear sub­ma­rine when it’s gone “deep and qui­et.”

You’re sub­merged, umpteen fath­oms down, cut off from the rest of the world, focused exclu­sive­ly on your mis­sion. Over the course of those eight years, I’ve prob­a­bly gone “deep and qui­et” for five or six months a dozen times. This means that I’ve been out of touch, focused on noth­ing but my mis­sion, for approx­i­mate­ly five of the last eight years.

While “deep and qui­et,” how­ev­er, I’ve had to con­tend with the equiv­a­lent of fires aboard my sub­ma­rine, but I haven’t let those divert me from my mis­sion to write and FINISH my epic-length series. Over the past eight years I’ve had to write through tooth abscess­es and implants, con­tract­ing COVID, a bro­ken hand, get­ting sober from alco­hol (I will have 5 years’ sobri­ety on 11/11/23), car break­downs, my spouse get­ting sick with COVID (and tak­ing care of her), mov­ing, house-hunt­ing (with­out suc­cess 3 sep­a­rate times for six months to a year), com­put­ers dying, an uncle dying, “run­ner’s knee,” and back issues. The back issues became such a prob­lem (even despite my $2,000 Aeron chair) a few months ago, that I had to get a motor­ized sit-stand desk.

Invari­ably, when I resur­face after one of these long “deep and qui­et” peri­ods, a lot of stuff has happened—stuff that oth­er peo­ple encounter and deal with in their dai­ly lives, but which I know noth­ing about. When I resur­faced ear­li­er this week, here are some of the things I just found out about:

- Ukraine is beat­ing back Rus­sia.

- Putin is still a major DICK.

- The Island of Maui burned to the ground.

- The econ­o­my of Venezuela col­lapsed, and thou­sands of refugees have been hik­ing north through the jun­gles of South and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca to get to the U.S.

- There’s a new Stu­dent Loan For­give­ness pro­gram.

- Chad Look­abaugh, the local ten­nis pro I took lessons from and did work­outs with, died sud­den­ly in Jan­u­ary. He was a great guy, and I’ll miss hang­ing out with him in the win­ter in front of the fire­place in the lob­by of his ten­nis club.

- Infla­tion is a very real thing; yet, mys­te­ri­ous­ly, gaso­line prices remain steady (hmm…).

- Kids’ cere­al icons Count Choc­u­la, BooBer­ry and Franken­Ber­ry now have a female coun­ter­part (well, it’s about time!) named Caramel­la.

- Sad­ly (because I own a good amount of Tes­la stock), Elon Musk seems to be behav­ing like Veronica’s dip­shit rich broth­er in the Archie comics.

- The mak­ers of products—especially food—are up to their old tricks again with shrink­fla­tion: charg­ing you the same (or more) for less prod­uct.

- The U.S. gov­ern­ment shut down, or is/was about to shut down, or some­thing.

- And instead of Crack­er Jacks, it’s now all about Crack­er Jills (good rid­dance, Jack; you and your frig­gin’ mutt on the pack­age had like a 90-year run, and towards the end I COULD NEVER FIND YOU F‑CKS any­where!).

What’s my point? Although it’s a bit of cul­ture shock to resur­face and learn that so many things have changed while I’ve been preoccupied—on my mis­sion as it were—I don’t regret a minute of it. For the past eight years, I’ve been hap­pi­ly ensconced in 1986–87 Amer­i­ca, specif­i­cal­ly in the world of teenagers at that time. I can’t tell you any­thing about what’s going on right now, but I can tell you that in Octo­ber 1986 the U.S.–U.S.S.R. talks at Reyk­javik broke down, and that in Novem­ber 1986 the Iran-Con­tra scan­dal came to light. I can tell you that in Sep­tem­ber 1986 the song “Venus” by Bana­nara­ma was at the top of the charts, and Huey Lewis and the News’ “Stuck with You” was ris­ing on the charts as well. I can tell you that in Octo­ber 1986, dur­ing the sea­son pre­miere of Dal­las, it was revealed that every­thing that hap­pened in the pre­vi­ous season—when Bob­by Ewing died—was a dream in Pam Ewing’s mind.

For eight years I’ve been inhab­it­ing a world when the U.S. was on top, when Chi­na was just a coun­try with almost a bil­lion peo­ple that rode bicy­cles every­where, when the U.S.S.R. was crum­bling, when Ronald Rea­gan was Pres­i­dent,  when “cel­lu­lar tele­phones” were extreme­ly rare and were big­ger than mil­i­tary walkie-talkies (see the beach scene in the orig­i­nal Wall Street)l, when The Cos­by Show was #1 on TV, when phone booths were still avail­able, and when—GASP—there was no inter­net.

I’ve been sub­merged here for quite a while, though, and so it’s good to come up for some 2023 air. With this in mind, I’m giv­ing myself the entire month of Octo­ber off. What am I going to do? Take naps. Hike. Swim. Lift weights. Run. Climb a moun­tain or two. Stretch. Play with my dog. Seek out type­writ­ers at vin­tage stores. Vis­it vin­tage cloth­ing stores for appar­el for my edi­tor alter-ego (to debut in Novem­ber or December—stay tuned). Lis­ten to jazz and clas­si­cal music (any­thing but ’80s rock and pop, which is all I’ve been lis­ten­ing to for eight years). Have some great meals out. Go to Boston. Go to the Adiron­dacks. Buy a set of cross-coun­try skat­ing skis for what I hope will be a record amount of snow­fall this win­ter.

And last, but not least, read about 20 books (a dozen of them will be re-reads) dur­ing the break so I’m not think­ing about my teen epic, includ­ing Loli­ta, Robin­son Cru­soe, The Odyssey, Goldfin­ger, The Longest Day, High Adven­ture, The Great Gats­by, A Farewell to Arms, Self-Edit­ing for Fic­tion Writ­ers, Edi­tors on Edit­ing, Imme­di­ate Fic­tion, Max Perkins: Edi­tor of Genius, a book about fonts enti­tled Just My Type, and books on gram­mar and punc­tu­a­tion as I pre­pare to under­take my favorite part of the writ­ing process in December—revision, edit­ing and pol­ish­ing.

Right now, how­ev­er, I’m archiv­ing my work on this draft and print­ing the com­plet­ed draft. It’s stag­ger­ing to see the stacks and stacks of pages I’ve pro­duced to bring me to this point—the dozens of legal pads of long­hand notes and pages from the nov­el; the hun­dreds of pages typed on one of my type­writ­ers and scanned and OCR’d into the com­put­er; the dozens of spi­ral note­books of char­ac­ter sketch­es or scene ideas; the reams of ’80s pic­tures and research files. All of this mate­r­i­al is being boxed up and stored out of my purview.

I print­ed two copies of the nov­el. One copy is stored in my base­ment, and the sec­ond is in the trunk of my car. Each copy is 2,915 legal pages (sin­gle-spaced). These are sole­ly emer­gency hard-copies—in case all of the 10–12 hard dri­ve and USB stick back­ups of my writ­ing are sud­den­ly wiped out by an EMP.

For the past 30 years that I’ve been revis­ing my writ­ing, I’ve always made hand-edits on print­ed pages, then entered those changes into a word pro­cess­ing file. But hav­ing just fin­ished the 2^nd draft, when I engaged in that process for lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of pages, each page with dozens and dozens of small edits on it, I real­ized that if I want to fin­ish this colos­sus some­time dur­ing my life­time (seri­ous­ly, I want to pub­lish in the fall of 2025), I can’t use this paper process any­more. It triples the amount of time that revi­sions take.

No, sir…this time I’m going hi-tech.

For this part of the process my dar­ling wife just bought me a new Microsoft Sur­face tablet, which will enable me to read the nov­el any­where and either make edits on the device or at least put in short com­ments, flag­ging spots that I need to fix. Any­way, I’m excit­ed about it because I have a feel­ing it’s going to make this part of the process much more effi­cient.

The moment I got the tablet, I gave it a seri­ous test. The hard­est part of the process was get­ting it updat­ed, logged in, etc., but once that was done I loaded THE ENTIRE 1.54-MILLION-WORD NOVEL onto this thing that weighs about a pound, is small­er than a sheet of paper, and only as thick as 20–30 sheets of paper (maybe). It’s incred­i­ble, and I am con­fi­dent that it’s going to revis­ing the 3^rd draft much, much more effi­cient.

My plan for this com­ing draft is as fol­lows:

1. Take the month of Octo­ber off com­plete­ly. Ded­i­cate my days to work­ing out, eat­ing well, going places with my dog every day, going to thrift stores, going out to lunch with friends (all 2 or three of them). On rainy days, I’ll con­sol­i­date the papers (ran­dom notes, ref­er­ence mate­ri­als, etc.) and come up with a mas­ter list of ’80s-relat­ed “stuff” that I want to make sure I work into the nov­el.

2. Start­ing Novem­ber 1, I will read (with­out edit­ing; not an easy task for a nov­el­ist) the entire series. This read­ing will be done in three main ways: a) on the tablet, b) on the print­ed hard copy, and c) with the “com­put­er lady” read­ing the book to me as I walk on the tread­mill and work out—maybe even as I’m hik­ing! While read­ing, I will NOT be mak­ing revi­sions; this first read is to try to get a view of the entire for­est, to step back and see the vista with­out becom­ing obsessed about one or two trees.

Rather than mak­ing edits to the man­u­script, I plan on keep­ing audio record­ings (this is where the tablet comes in) of notes of errors, things to fact-check, and over­all impres­sions of each day’s read­ing, chap­ters and episodes. Keep audio record­ings of all this stuff so I don’t stop read­ing to make edits. Do a jour­nal entry every evening with that day’s impressions—what pages I cov­ered, my gut impres­sions of that day’s mate­r­i­al, and my thoughts on what will need to be revised.

3. Start­ing Decem­ber 1, lit­er­al­ly putting on my editor’s hat (stay tuned), I will begin the revi­sion and edit­ing. I’m giv­ing myself one year to revise the entire series. My plan is to quick­ly “swoop” through the entire series three times in a year, start­ing by mak­ing the largest revi­sions (any big CUTS that need to be made) first, and grad­u­al­ly mak­ing my revi­sion and edit­ing more gran­u­lar as the year goes on.

The main way in which this draft is going to be dif­fer­ent from the process I’ve used with all of my pre­vi­ous books is this: there will be NO hand-cor­rec­tions made to a paper draft that then need to be entered into the com­put­er. In the past, this is the part of the process that has con­sumed the most time. Hon­est­ly, I real­ly, real­ly pre­fer this leisure­ly, tac­tile method, but I don’t have the lux­u­ry with this behe­moth novel—not if I want to release it in late Novem­ber 2025. With the tablet, I’ll be able to read and/or lis­ten to the book and make edits to the file itself. 

Hon­est­ly, though, I’m a lit­tle sad that I have to give up the paper edit­ing. Espe­cial­ly in the fall, when one of my favorite things to do in life is to sit on my deck with a hot cup of cof­fee, a crisp stack of pages, and a red pen. But there will be oth­er, short­er nov­els for that.

The most impor­tant thing for me in the com­ing year is to just get the sonov­abitch DONE. I’m break­ing the year up into three 120-day “swoop­ing” peri­ods; dur­ing each 120-day cycle, I plan to “swoop” through the entire man­u­script, start­ing with iden­ti­fy­ing large sec­tions that can/should be cut, and mak­ing my revi­sions and edit­ing increas­ing­ly gran­u­lar with the next two “swoops.” My plan is that by next Decem­ber (2024) I will have gone through the entire 14-episode series three times. And then, in 2025 and 2026 I’ll pol­ish each episode pri­or to pub­li­ca­tion.

Check back here in late Octo­ber or ear­ly Novem­ber for the debut of my edit­ing alter-ego.

Tagged: 1980s, 80s, adventure, deadlines, epic novel, male romance, novel writing, novel writing process, novelist's work day, romance, second draft, submarines, teen romance, teens, writing, writing life, writing process

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